News roundup, 26 March 2026

- The last shipments of oil to make it out of the Strait of Hormuz are expected to reach their destinations over the next 8-10 days. Since there isn't expected to be any more for the foreseeable future, expect dramatic increases in fuel prices, and outright shortages in some places. Even if the strait is reopened, it will take time to restore oil reserves; whether voters will understand who to blame for this has yet to be determined, but Trump seems to be desperately looking for a way out.

- Polls in Hungary continue to show the opposition Tisza party widening its lead over Viktor Orban's Fidesz. An election is set to take place on the 12th of April, unless Orban finds some excuse to cancel it.

- A building formerly owned by Providence University College and Theological Seminary is being converted into transitional housing for formerly homeless people. When complete it will have 118 units; critics say that more is needed. Meanwhile the college that used to own the building is laying off staff due to the cap on international students.

- A CBC investigation has found that the RCMP conducted intensive spying operations on indigenous organizations across the country, including the Manitoba Metis Federation and the National Indian Brotherhood (now known as the Assembly of First Nations).

- Russ Wyatt, who represents Transcona on Winnipeg's city council, has been charged with sexual assault after a man claimed Wyatt drugged and assaulted him after meeting him on social media. While mayor Scott Gillingham is urging Wyatt to go on leave, council has no mechanism to suspend a member facing criminal charges.

- A committee of Winnipeg city council has voted to revoke a conditional use permit that allowed a West End family to keep pigeons. This follows concerns from neighbours about the impact of feces, but also fears about aviation safety due to the proximity to the airport. For their part, the family say that the pigeons are important therapy animals for their autistic child.

News roundup, 21 Oct 2024

- BC's election is too close to call, with the results in several constituencies riding on mail-in and out-of-district ballots that haven't been counted yet. Mail-ins aren't expected to be counted until the 26th; it's a safe bet that if the Conservatives end up losing they'll use the delayed results as "evidence" that the election was rigged. And it's more than a bit disturbing that over 40% of the electorate (probably much higher in rural areas) voted for a far-right extremist party. And in the last week of the campaign, someone cut Nathan Cullen's image out of a lawn sign and suspended it from a makeshift gallows; sadly that seems to be fairly reflective of the way that constituency is going, given that Cullen was defeated on Saturday.

- Winnipeg mayor Scott Gillingham is proposing a new emergency service that would specialize in mental health issues. Given that the police have a rather spotty track record in that area, plus the fact that even the sight of a police uniform can be a problem for some people in crisis, this may be a good idea.

- The impact of climate change on heavily populated areas such as the Middle East and south Asia are hard to overstate. Many places are running out of water as rainfalls decline; some people will die in place but many more will become what might be called "environmentally displaced people". Some use the term "climate refugee", but they don't fit the current international definition of refugee, and the chances of the definition being updated and thus obligating signatories to the refugee convention to accept them are pretty slim. Incidentally, some historians believe that the so-called "Sea Peoples" linked to the Late Bronze Age collapse were environmentally displaced people. Think about that, then maybe read Christopher Priest's novel Fugue for a Darkening Island...

- The US Department of the Interior has approved a 2 gigawatt geothermal energy site in Utah. The operation is expected to generate enough electricity to supply over 2 million homes.

- A survey of employers found that many of them are having a hard time implementing a return-to-office policy. 75% say that they are having problems getting workers to comply with RTO mandates. Interestingly, only about half say that they "definitely" or "probably" will be stricter in their enforcement of such mandates.

- Several Republican AGs in the US are suing the FDA for approving online sales of the abortion drug mifepristone (also known as RU-486). One of the harms they're claiming is rather interesting - there has been a drop in births among kids aged 15 to 19, which has the potential to slow population growth and thus potentially result in states like Missouri "losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding". Yeah, they said one of the quiet parts out loud.

- An RCMP officer in Burnaby has finally been forced out after having spent more than half of his career on paid leave for reasons the force seems reluctant to discuss in any detail.

RCMP backed off from endorsing safe injection site: report

Seems they were all ready to make a public statement, then were ordered not to:

It would have been quite a news conference, and it very nearly happened. Last fall, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, after months of intense, private talks, agreed to face the media together to declare their agreement that research shows the “benefits” and “positive impacts” of supervised injection sites for intravenous drug users.

For the RCMP, making such a statement would have been a turning point: the Mounties would have had to distance themselves from dubious studies, commissioned by the force itself, that were critical of Insite, Vancouver’s pioneering safe injection facility. And that would have been a politically awkward move for the federal police, since Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is firmly committed to shutting down Insite.

****

The proposed joint media release was never issued. Nor did the RCMP officers and the centre’s doctors appear together for their planned news conference. According to Montaner, two days before the scheduled event last December—after a venue had been booked at the University of British Columbia and “the banners were ready”—he received a telephone call from Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass, the most senior RCMP officer in British Columbia. “He said, ‘Julio, can’t do it,’ ” Montaner recalls. “I said, ‘What do you mean, Gary?’ He said, ‘I’m really sorry, I’ve been ordered not to go ahead with the news conference.’ ” Montaner says Bass made it clear that the order came from RCMP headquarters in Ottawa.

From Maclean's, via 6079_Smith_W in this babble thread. What I find interesting is not so much that this happened (stories of federal government institutions being ordered to suppress information are commonplace in today's Canada) but that Maclean's is reporting it. Maclean's is about as mainstream as you get in this country; if they are willing to publish such stories, it's a sign that the MSM is losing confidence in the Harper government. It seems like the census issue and/or the war has opened the floodgates, and suddenly all the negative stories that the MSM had previously ignored have become news. If so, this is very good; it's a sign that Harper's days as PM are numbered.

Mounties doing Harper's dirty work

It should come as no surprise that a lot of cops support the conservatives (indeed, one of them is running in St. Boniface). The Mounties who provide security for Stephen Harper, though, seem to be doing more than simply keeping him safe:

The swarm of suits chatter up their sleeves as Stephen Harper arrives at a suburban home construction site for his campaign promise du jour, this one a $750 tax goodie for first-time home-buyers.

As usual with Harper's travelling film clip, nothing is left to chance, especially not a photo op for the night news.

Incredibly, it is the Mounties who help make sure it is all picture perfect.

Charged with ensuring the prime minister's safety, the RCMP security service has instead been forced to become the Conservative party's armed public relations agency for the election campaign.

Last week, the Mounties were used to corral a television crew doing its job. Yesterday morning, it was about a dozen angry autoworkers losing their jobs who threatened Harper's sound bite of the day, and wound up on the wrong end of the Horsemen.

One of them began yelling protest slogans on a bullhorn while the Conservative leader was giving his speech on a vacant lot across the street, out of sight and all but safely out of earshot.

Suddenly, the bullhorn guy was nose-to-nose with a giant bald cop with a wire in his ear and a gun on his hip, a member of the prime minister's formidable RCMP bodyguards.

On this day, one of the nation's finest was pressed into service as a political PR operative, trying to silence pesky protesters.

The cop ordered the man to shut off the bullhorn that was apparently being picked up on media microphones recording the PM's every word for the night news.

"You're disturbing the peace," the Horseman said to the autoworker, who naturally interpreted the growling notice as a threat of handcuffs.

Until Harper was safely on site, the protesters were actually barricaded behind police lines a half-kilometre away, too far for the TV camera operators to walk.

From here. The idea of keeping nonviolent protesters at a distance on pain of arrest is straight out of Karl Rove's operating manual, don't you think? Remember the "free speech zones" from the US?

Actually, there's a lot of stuff going on in this election campaign that I'd rather see remain south of the border (well, I'd rather it wasn't happening anywhere, but it hits home harder when it happens in one's own country). The fact that the Conservatives are using the fact that Dion has been a professor against him in ads is another page from the Republican handbook.

Exposing corruption... by being corrupt?

The Cambridge Times has an interesting comment from a local MP, Gary Goodyear, on the recent RCMP raid at the Conservative Party's Ottawa headquarters:

Although some argue over the political timing, Goodyear said it was the Conservatives who actually brought the campaign finance issue to the fore when it filed a claim against Elections Canada to seek reimbursement for advertising expenses. The Conservatives have taken the matter to Federal Court.

As a friend of mine points out, when a party that's accused of illegal activities claims credit for drawing attention to the problem, it's a bit like a drunk driver saying "Without people like me going out and killing people every so often, they'd never do anything about drunk driving!" Takes a certain amount of chutzpah to say something like that.

On the home front, packing and preparation, including trying to balance quality time with friends (some of whom are incompatible with one another) continues apace. I actually had to work Saturday of all days, because we were still doing surveys at the Centre Wellington landfill, asking everyone who showed up with garbage or recycling a short questionnaire and putting their garbage and putting it in our truck if they gave certain answers (very few people were actually sampled). On the plus side, this means I'll get tomorrow off, so I'll have the opportunity to do a lot of preparation.

Among the things I must do is to decide whether or not to keep my bike, and to get a bike rack for my car if I do decide to keep it. It's a good, solid, reliable bike, in excellent mechanical condition, and has rendered yeoman service over the last four years. On the other hand, it only cost me $50 at a yard sale, and I am reminded of the reason for this low price each time I have to pedal it up a significant hill or carry it up or down a flight of stairs. Of course, significant hills are not exactly common in Winnipeg, but staircases are. And it's been pointed out to me that a bike rack for a car is one of those things that you almost never use as much as you think you will. This is doubly true for me, since although I use my bike a lot, it's usually because I want to get somewhere, and driving out to Bird's Hill to ride my bike around isn't the sort of thing I'm liable to do.